


ain’t it time to just wake up and live?

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [31]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Families of Choice, Genderfluid Character, Genderqueer Character, Humanstuck, Miscommunication, Other, Protective Siblings, Transmisogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 11:54:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11184585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: You're Mituna Captor, and you're about to come out to one of the most important people in your life. However, you're so nervous that all you want to do is change your mind, cancel your plans, build a blanket fort, and play Halo 2 for the next twenty-four hours. Although none of your friends or lovers will push you to do something you don’t want to do, you’re tired of hiding. So fucking sick of hiding. You need Sollux to know who you are. You need to kick the closet door into bits, even if the fallout might not be so good for you. So many people know you, but not your little brother. Not fully.You need to rectify that.





	ain’t it time to just wake up and live?

**Author's Note:**

> shoutout to one of the homies for not getting off my back until i finished this, for reading this over so it wasn't utter shit, and for convincing my depressive ass to not to abandon ship 3k words in. 
> 
> everyone should listen to the song i used for the epigram and title, if they have the chance or inclination. i've linked early it in the story. and it's a really nice song, which i first heard while watching sense8. 
> 
> also, to understand more of this story, you might want to consider reading these collegestuck fics: "the shining of you that  
> just breaks me in two" and the first chapter of "take me in. take me. take." lastly, the sex scene in this story is fairly mild, and almost skippable plot-wise, if that's not your thing. i've set this fic's rating at M, but if people think that's too lenient, i'll move it up to E.
> 
> that's pretty much it. thank you so much for reading.

_Are we not wise enough to give all we are?_  
_Surely we’re bright enough to outshine the stars._  
_But humankind gets so lost in finding its way._  
_We have a chance to make a difference ‘til our dying day._

 _-_ Lamb, [Wise Enough](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D5t5QSiydF9Y&t=NjkwYWNhODllNDJmZTk1NjViNjE0NzhiNDRlMmVmZDk1ZTVhMDk0Nyw3S3o1YTk4eQ%3D%3D&b=t%3A8Enk7uOusypR8G83_Qgk5Q&p=http%3A%2F%2Fc0llegestuck.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F161746999015%2Ftitle-aint-it-time-to-just-wake-up-and-live&m=1)

* * *

 

**_June 5th, 2010 - Mituna Captor_ **

It’s 6:30 in the morning, and you’re only awake because  Enderman is fucking hungry, wouldn’t stop meowing right into your ear, and subsequently roused you from the deadest possible sleep. You were up half the night talking to Latula, because that is what you do on Friday nights. And Thursday nights. And Wednesday nights. And… well, you get the idea.

This cat, though. Well, you’re the one who took him in, when he was a kitten sitting on your fire escape, so he’s your problem now.

Enderman will only eat if you put his food out. If Porrim or Callie does, he’ll stare at it until you dump it and do it you yourself. If Kurloz even _tries_ to feed him, he’ll bite his ankles. Maybe he thinks they’re all trying to poison him.

Your mother used to think that about your family quite often, when her treatment wasn’t working. You and Sollux could get her to eat half the time, but only about half. Once, she got so delusional, that she told you and your brother to stop eating the food in the fridge, and to keep the television switched off because of the dangerous messages trying to worm into your brain. Even out of her mind, she didn’t want you two to get hurt.

(While she was asleep one night, you told Sollux it was totally okay if you turned on the TV to play Soul Calibur II, because you weren’t _watching_ TV; you were _playing video games_. No parasitic subliminal messages there.)

You frown.

You have your own apartment, and a job that pays above minimum wage, and a circle of close friends you trust. You are living life on your own terms. Somehow, you have become an adult. 

But you miss your mother and father. 

And you miss Sollux.

Idly, you wonder if there’s an equivalent of paranoid schizophrenia in cats. You’d need to ask someone about that, and although Porrim and Calliope are smarter than two people should be, you don’t think either of them is well-versed in feline neurology.

You yawn, get up, stumble sleepily into the kitchen, dig out the twenty pound bag of cat food, and pour him a bowl. He winds his way around your legs, nuzzling one, and then staring up at you. Then, he lets out a soft chirp of gratitude. You scritch him behind his ears, at which point, he bites you, for interrupting his breakfast.

You sigh, and put on the coffee.

While he eats, you look out the window. At least it’s light out. The bodega is probably open, if you have the inclination (and the money) to cop Parliament menthols, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich (with hot sauce), and a can of Arizona.

You’d only have to split your smokes two ways this time around.

Calliope’s staying the night with Roxy and Jade - a sleepover at Jade’s place on Eastern Parkway - and she probably won’t get back to your side of town until the afternoon. 

Kurloz is nowhere to be found. You aren’t particularly worried about him. He’ll be back sometime in the next two days, with more money than your average twenty-one year old college dropout should ever possess. 

If he’s still gone in a week, or if he doesn’t answer his texts by tomorrow, maybe you’ll worry.

That leaves you and Porrim in the apartment, neither of you wearing a stitch of fucking clothing, because it’s June, and you’re alone.

You want to laugh at the fact that it’s just you two here, the same way it was when you moved in here, in October 2008. 

You’ve traveled in a complete fucking circle, you know that?

“Today’s the day,” you tell Porrim over breakfast, an hour later. “I need to stop running.

She nods, rather serious. She knows what “it” is. 

Today’s the day you tell your brother exactly what kind of person you are, and you’re too nervous to be hungry. You could really use a fucking smoke, to be honest. 

You are Mituna Captor, the raddest person on Earth - Latula said so - but you’re nervous.

What if Sollux takes one look at you, storms out of Starbucks, and declares that he never wants to see you again? (Unlikely.) What if he takes one look at you and makes fun of you, jeering like those assholes on Forsyth Street? (Not very likely, but not impossible.)  What if he takes one look at you, has a civil, almost nice conversation with you, promises to hang out with you in the future, and never returns your calls? (More likely. Most likely, you think, sadly.) 

You don’t want you and Sollux to drift apart, to become siblings that only passingly acknowledge each other with a head nod at family gatherings. Gatherings that you probably won’t be invited to anyway, unless you put on more masculine attire.

Maybe you should just stay where you are. One foot in the closet, and one foot out. That’s the path of least resistance. If shit hits the fan, you can just jump back in and slam the door shut.

But you can’t stay there, you know that. It’s not a matter of want. It’s a matter of need. You can’t take its stifling confines again, now that you’re mostly out. 

Even if you really and truly wanted to, some of Sollux’s friends already know your deal. While Calliope would take a secret like this to the grave, you don’t know about the rest of them.

Also, being that you live in fucking Chinatown, your mother keeps sending friends of hers around your place to check on you. They try to do it furtively, but you’d recognize these women anywhere. 

You grew up around them. When your mother was in her right mind, all of them would sit in the dining room, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and complaining about pretty much everything. The price of prawns per pound, Jiang Zemin’s policies, the omnipresent filth of the Sutter Avenue subway station, the fact that this entire area was a self-sustaining floating island of garbage and armed robbery, and how you and Sollux should be far more respectful toward the woman who gave birth to you.

When they were your age, as they related it, they didn’t ask questions, and they didn’t ask for frivolous things like video games.

You didn’t dare point out that video games weren’t out in the year 1872, mostly because you and Sollux were supposed to be eavesdropping _quietly._ You’d always had problems believing they were ever your age, so you cackled as softly as you could.

They made your mother happy and calm, and came to visit her when she was less than lucid, so you decided to leave them be. True friends, those.

You think at least two of them have seen you in feminine clothing. You know Mrs. Cheng has, mostly because you literally bumped into her on Mott and Bayard, while you were running errands. You were wearing a thin sundress and sandals, with your hair tied away from your face, because it was pushing 90 degrees on that day in April. 

You apologized quickly for your oversight, and helped her pick up her belongings. She accepted your apology, gently suggesting that, “perhaps you should look where you’re walking, next time, young lady.”

Then, she got a better look at you, and you saw faint recognition alight in her eyes.

Before she could say your name, before she could even get the first syllable out, you took off running as fast as you could in the opposite direction, only getting on your skateboard - another good way to recognize you - once you were fully out of sight. 

Since news travels fast down the grapevine of old nosy Chinese ladies with overladen shopping carts, your mother has to know certain things about you. She must. And given what happened more than a decade ago, she may have known longer than that. 

She might have been the first to know, even before you did fully.

She caught you wearing her clothes when you were nine, along with your awful attempts to apply her makeup. She didn’t admonish you in the least. 

She just fixed your lipstick, and told you to ask her before you did something like this again. A lot of the clothes she had came with her from Guangdong, when she came to the US. 

Moreover, some of them belonged to her mother, who passed on long before you were born. The way family tells this story, when they think you and Sollux are sleeping, your grandmother’s death is what unhinged your mother, even though you didn’t think so.

(When you got your diagnosis, your mother told you she’d been having hallucinations since before she finished primary school, twenty years before her mother died.)

Nevertheless, your mother folded and refolded your grandmother’s clothes almost obsessively. These garments were what she had left of a woman you’d only seen in pictures, one your mother seemed to idolize. Therefore, they needed to be treated with utmost care and reverence.

“I know you mean no harm,” she began. “But you should always ask before taking things that are not yours.”

“Sorry, Mama,” you said.

Then, she told you to lick your two front teeth. There was lipstick on them.

If your father knows about you and your proclivities, it’s not like he’ll say anything. He has got to be the quietest person you know, other than Kurloz. You don’t think he’ll give a shit, to be perfectly honest. He won’t exactly understand, you can’t imagine that he would, but he won’t disown you, and he probably won’t even be angry at you for it.

But can you tell Sollux, though? Can you tell your brother?

He’s been asking why you left home since you moved out almost two years ago, wondering if it had anything to do with him, even when you told him it didn’t. He keeps asking why you don’t talk to him as much as you used to, when you told each other everything. 

He still asks these questions on a regular basis, as if he can bring the old you back with the answers. You hadn’t known your brother cared that much about you until then.

Last time he called, you cried on Calliope for an hour afterwards.

(“You can tell me anything, you know?” he’d said. “I love you. We’re family, older brother.”

He said the last bit in Canto.

You got off the phone with him pretty fast, after that turning those words over, and over in your head until they made you sick. Older brother. Older brother. Older brother.

You looked in the mirror later, and felt mildly annoyed. Not dysphoric, really. You don’t know if you experience dysphoria the way people online describe it. You’re just pissed off at the fact that almost everyone will see you as someone you’re not, because they’re incapable of seeing you as anyone else.

You don’t have any identity disorders, you don’t think. It’s the world that’s disordered, trying to cram you into one of two boxes that you don’t fit. One fits better than the other, but it still doesn’t _fucking fit_ the way you’d want it to. 

You think of the time Porrim caught you trying on one of her sequined dresses. It fit you, but only just. You had to suck in your stomach and try not to breathe too hard. And since it was rather short on Porrim, it was way too short on you.

Nothing fits right. You resist the urge to kick something.

For the record, you don’t have a gender identity disorder. You have a gender identity. There’s nothing disordered about it.

One evening not that long ago, you told Porrim your thoughts at two in the morning, and she gave you this wide, satisfied smile.

“There isn’t a goddamn thing wrong with you, Mituna,” she said, swaying slightly in her five inch pumps, having had a few drinks too many at a bar with her nursing school cohorts. “I’m almost a nurse, and I say there’s nothing fucking wrong with you, okay? It’s all societal bullshit concerned with pathologizing difference, variation, and disagreement with the status quo.”

She went on about something to a condition they diagnosed runaway slaves with, drapetomania, and how it was considered a mental illness in those days.

“Freedom as a mental illness, can you believe that shit? And homosexuality was a disorder until the 1970s! The 70s!" she exclaimed, removing her shoes with surprising grace given her blood alcohol content. “No diagnostic criteria comes without its biases, even now.”

You looked up at the ceiling as if to ask god why Porrim turns into a more tolerable version of Kankri whenever she has too much fireball. You were able to smell the cinnamon on her from three feet away. You decided to stop her lecture by screwing with her, because if you couldn’t screw with your best friend of nearly a decade, who could you screw with?

“Yeah, Pomary, I’m sane as any other jackoff, other than the hallucinations and the delusions and all that other fun shit,” you said, completely deadpan.

Even if you rejected one diagnosis for being stupid as hell, your weird schizo shit was still a thing that you had then and have now. You’ve come to terms with it.

Porrim pointed an indignant finger at you, then got close enough to jab it into the bony jut of your clavicle. Her heel caught a dirty pair of your pants and she toppled over. 

She glared at you from the floor, like you left your jeans there on purpose.

“You know. What the fuck. I mean.”

“I know you had too much to drink,” you said with a snort.

You picked her up bridal style, deposited her on the futon, and took away her phone so she couldn’t drunk dial Meenah like last time. You even told her this. 

Then, she slurred for a while about how handsome Meenah was, how watching her dance was like witnessing something holy, and how they were going to see the cherry blossoms in the Bronx Botanical Garden over the weekend. Finally, she passed out.

You think carefully, and not about drunk Porrim. 

You think about the shit you’ve read on the internet. Even if dysphoria isn’t part of your life, at least how you understand that, you do experience euphoria. Is gender euphoria a thing?

You shrug. Probably.

And, your positive emotions aside, what about Sollux? He said he loves you, and that brothers stick together, but you’re scared that means that he loves the person he thinks you are, not the person you’ve become.

Everyone’s known you as “the Captor brothers” since he was old enough to go to the park with you, since you were old enough to supervise him alone. The Captor brothers, two kids who could probably break the laws of physics if they wanted to.

You two found a niche in your community, at least one that stopped people from mugging you for your lunch money. When people’s computers broke down, or started doing weird shit, you and Sollux fixed them to the best of your abilities.

When Sollux was old enough to roam East Flatbush mostly on his own, your old elementary school friends would descend on him and demand to know where his brother was - usually in the library, with Porrim. Because you and Sollux were seldom apart.

The fucking Captor brothers.

Can you throw that away? Can you shatter his paradigms?

All in the name of your euphoria?

You stop thinking for a few minutes, losing yourself in pleasant thoughts.

(When you’re dressed mostly masculine - usually for your own safety, though you’ve got one of Porrim’s red scallop neck tops on beneath your hoodie - you’ve got eyeliner on underneath your hair, and are wearing a conspicuous shade of scarlet lipstick. It makes you grin.

You look at yourself in the mirror for a while, because you think look pretty, and your roommates agree. Okay, so you look like a gangly fuck in your usual clothes, minus the makeup you’re wearing.

Calliope looks you up and down admiringly. 

Kurloz says that you have more game in one finger than anyone of any gender does in their whole body. People will fall at your feet, swooning at your glorious good looks, and begging to jump your motherfucking bones.

Porrim takes her resting bitch face out for a spin, but you tell her to chill out. That’s Kurloz’s version of a compliment. She gives one of her usual judgmental sighs.

Then, you think of another memory.

You’re at Latula’s, in the room she shares with Terezi - whom she lovingly told to get lost for five hours - and Latula’s straddling you on her bed, with a devious look in her eye. 

She undoes your black bra, the lacy one she got you for your 21st birthday, and says you’re the most beautiful person she’s ever seen. All of a sudden, you feel shy, even though you’ve done this a hundred times before. Latula kisses you on the forehead. Her dark brown hair hangs over you, forming a nice, safe curtain around your face.

“Are you sure you want to…?”

“I am like, nine million percent sure.”

“You don’t have to hide from me, Tuna. Not unless you want to,” she says, snapping the waistband on your black panties against your abdomen. “You suck at hiding when we’re playing UT ‘99 anyway. You’re a shitty sniper.”

“I don’t want to hide,” you tell her. And you don’t.

She’s perfect, though she’s opined the way her extra weight has distributed itself. The least God could have done was done was given her an hourglass figure, since she’ll never be as model-thin as Porrim, nor does she really want to be.

You like how soft she is, how her stretch marks form interesting patterns, how she laughs, ticklish, whenever you drum your fingers up and down her sides. 

You love her mind, its verve, its wit, its perceptive nature. You love watching her write, watching her study, watching her curse, crumple up first drafts, chuck them at the wall, but return to them later.

(You also love the fact that she’s loud as hell during sex when she’s into it, because you’re still in shock that you can make such a stunning woman come undone.)

You tell her that, and she refuses to believe it, until you swear on all your video games, even the ones you like. Figures, that’d be the tipping point of all things.

She has you lift your hips so she can tug your underwear down. She nibbles her way up your thigh, and just when you think she’s going to _touch_ you, she skips that altogether. Fucking tease. She’s always a tease when she can get away with it. 

“Te quiero,” she murmurs against your stomach, right below your below your belly button. Lying on her bed, you realize this is the happiest you’ve been in ages.

That’s your sign. That’s your sign that you’re moving in the right direction in terms of sorting your shit out. It’s not just that you’re having sex with your girlfriend. It’s that you’re having sex with your girlfriend, she knows who you are, and she adores you. You don’t know why you thought it would be different. You don’t know why you thought she would have a different reaction.

She has to bite back some kind of strangled sound when you pull her underwear off, and let your index finger swirl around her clit. You do that for several minutes, along with playing with her nipples and the underside of her breasts. She’s not going to tell you to hurry up and skip half the foreplay - in fact, she’s usually more patient than you are - but you can feel her growing restless. 

You reach for the condom on her nightstand and put it on.

You pluck her glasses off her eyes, and put them in the in the place the condom once was on her nightstand.

She turns you over, so you’re the one on top of her. Slowly, you ease yourself inside her. She’s more slick than you thought she would be. You start to move, your joy so intense it almost hurts. 

She’s so warm, rippling around you, and you are going memorize every last second of this, even if your medication causes your recollections to haze over.

You two establish a decent rhythm, occasionally staccato, and occasionally clumsy, but there is a certain perfection in imperfection.

Latula’s hands scrabble down your back, and then anchor in your hair. She pulls you close, and rocks against you, making nonsense noises low in her throat. She tries to modulate them, because the window is open, and someone could be listening

Nobody is, though.

You’re sure nobody’s listening, because if they had been listening, the sound of Latula’s orgasm would have probably sent them running. She comes after you do, but not too long after.

Once you two have finished, not ready for round two at the moment, you lie next to each other in her bed.

She turns onto her side.

“I love you, Tuna,” she says, having not quite caught her breath yet.

You’re both still trying to catch your breath and stop sweating so much.

“You’re just saying that ‘cause I screwed your brains out.”

She laughs.

“I loved you before you screwed my brains out. And I think I’m going to keep loving you for a while.”)

In the present, you sigh, wishing Latula were awake so you could talk to her. Like, not talk dirty to her, since you already did that last night - well, she did most of the talking - but actually _talk_ to her. Maybe she could tell you how to proceed. 

You used to cheat off her on AP World History exams back in high school. It could be a little like that.

But there are no right answers, here. There are no wrong answers, here.

You then wish you could time travel and see Sollux’s reaction to your revelation, so you’d know what to do now. Keep going or drop back?

No such luck.

You feel warm breath against your neck, the feel of long braids tickling you, and smell a familiar combination of jasmine tea, cigarettes, sweat, and coconut oil. Hands find their way into your hair, and massage your scalp. This relaxes you faster than any conventional anxiolytic could.

Porrim, she embraces you from behind, and she leans against your back, resting her head between your shoulderblades. She stretches to plant a kiss on the back of your neck.

“Well, take your meds, at the very least,” Porrim murmurs, once she lets go of you, lighting one cigarette, and handing another to you. “I think you have to eat on one of your medications anyway.”

You don’t want her to let go, though. You want her to become… something that can pass through you. Something that can be poured into you. If you had her with you, an entity to follow you to the Starbucks on Houston, you know you’d be able to say the right things to Sollux.

She’d be able to say the right things to Sollux. She’d be able to smooth it over, anticipate and compensate for his hypothetical concerns at your confession, and say both what he wanted to hear and what you needed to say, at the same fucking time.

Years of having to come up with decent lies to tell her parents as to why she left for forty-eight hours aside from the spurious excuse of studying for AP exams, years of defusing pretty much every argument that took place in your friend group, a few more years of womanist anarchist protesting and managing to dodge the authorities, twenty months of being the only “ethnic” model/cashier in that clothing store on Saint Mark’s Place, years of being the only Black woman in her nursing program, of swallowing microagressions and macroagressions like bad cough medicine, have given her an absolutely silver tongue.

She knows when to keep her mouth shut, but she also knows when to open it, and what to say when she does.

The only person who argues more fluidly and convincingly is Latula, and she’s not even awake yet. You send her a good morning text she probably won’t answer until 12 PM at the earliest.

You hear their voices in your head frequently, but they’re not quite coherent enough to advise you on this, as hallucinations.

If they could, Latula would suggest you tell Sollux without reservation, because she has always told Terezi and her parents everything about herself. She’s an open book. Porrim, who got her ass kicked and subsequently disowned behind being a lesbian-leaning bisexual woman, would tell you to play with your cards close to the vest at all times.

Here and now, though? Here and now, you remind yourself that you are the one that must make this decision. Your friends can help. But it’s on you.

“Your medication, Mituna?” Porrim asks.

You take a long swig directly from the coffee pot, washing down the pills with it. You know how much Porrim detests when you do that.

Instead of objecting, however, she takes a drag off her cigarette. She’s thinking. You can always tell when the gears start turning in her head.

“Are your clothes ready?” she asks.

“Yeah, ‘course.”

Well, your clothes are…  you don’t know.

You vaguely knew what you wanted to wear today, but you forgot to put it out last night. And now you’ve forgotten what it was.

You come up with an outfit on the fly. One of the thin gold blouses Porrim got you for Christmas 2008, and a pair of slacks, you guess.

Nonetheless, you’re not sure about the outfit. Fashion is Porrim’s thing, not yours.

You know you can’t show up to meet up with Sollux in a Pac-Man t-shirt, torn stockings, and a billowy knee-length yellow skirt. Okay, so you probably could. He’d likely recognize you instantly, because only you would be so attired.

You sort of want him to take you seriously, though. No ridiculous outfits today, even if Porrim’s eyebrows would go so high that they’d disappear into her hairline, and it’d be the funniest fucking thing you’d see all day.

She presses a kiss to your mouth, but doesn’t deepen it.

“You still have time to figure something out,” she says.

She watches you rifle through the closet for the blouse you want to wear. You also find a pencil skirt, one you’ve worn before, but not recently. You hold them both up for her. She gives you the thumbs up.

“Do you have stockings for that?” she asks you. “Though you don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to, it’s going to be fucking hot today.”

You pick up a rumpled pair of pantyhose off the floor, make sure they’re yours - Porrim’s are too small, all you’ll do is ruin them - and inspect them for runs. There’s a little run near the waistband, but you don’t think it’ll get that much worse today.

“Toldja I got this,” you tell her.

She rolls her eyes.

“That shirt’s going to need to be ironed. The skirt’s a little wrinkled, too.”

“I got this,” you repeat.

That’s technically not true. The last time you tried to iron anything, it was a pair of Porrim’s dress pants - you wanted to surprise her by getting all her stuff ready for class so she could sleep in for once - and you accidentally burned a hole clean through the ass part of the garment. A hole too big to sew shut. Porrim sighed and asked if you _had_ to burn a hole through her favorite pants.

But she noticed all the effort you put in that morning. You’d put out the notebooks she’d have needed for that day’s classes, since she taped her course schedule to the fridge. You’d left her giant ass nursing textbook, the one she ambivalently dubbed “The Bible” out on the card table, unsure if she planned to take it with her. You’d put her pharmacology index cards next to it. You’d even made breakfast, like, decent, edible, mildly tasty breakfast. So she forgave you.

That was nice, because even that amount of activity made you tired and spacey. Fucking lamotrigine.

“I guess if I make them into shorts, and make the hole a little wider, I can wear them to Pride, and show off my ass,” she’d said archly.

“You don’t need clothes to show off your ass,” you’d returned.

 _“Pomary’s ass: the eighth wonder of the world,”_ Kurloz had signed.

She’d thrown her hands up in the air, managing to not drop her cigarette with the gesture.

“I can’t take you two anywhere,” she’d said.

Now, Porrim sets up the ironing board, and instead of playing WoW to undeniably maintain your place as reigning monarch of the server, you watch her as she waits for the iron to warm up.

You plant a kiss on her temple, and she turns so you can kiss her fully, taking a few steps backwards, slightly thrown off balance. She bites down on her lower lip. Her nipples harden, as she brushes against you. But even as she yanks you nearer while she moans, she manages to put an inch of space between you two.

“If we knock over the ironing board, you’re fixing everything. Including the iron.”

“You know, one of Sollux’s friends is into engineering,” you return. “You could ask them to fix it.”

Porrim just shakes her head.

“God, screw you, Tuna.”

“I thought you’d never ask.” You kiss from her jawline down to her pulse point. “Ironing board’s not the hottest place I thought of doing it, but since it’s you, I’ll make an exception.”

“No, Tuna,” she says, and her tone makes it clear that she’s not playing coy, that the answer is no. “Besides, if everything goes right with your brother, then we can have victory sex. And not on the ironing board while it’s got a hot iron on it.”

Yeah, she’s probably right. She’s usually right. You pull away from her.

“And if it goes badly, Pomary?”

“Then we’ll figure it out, okay?” she asks. She kisses you one more time. “I know it’s hard, but you should probably stop catastrophizing. Sollux loves you.”

“He kicked me down a slide and gave me a concussion,” you point out.

Yeah, that was like ten years ago, but still.

“Didn’t you accidentally drop him down a flight of stairs once?” Porrim asks.

You nod. Yeah. That was a thing. It was an accident, though. He was like four years old and thought it was so fucking cool that he demanded you do it again.

You miss your brother more than you can properly articulate in words.

Sure, you love the friends you’ve made, but you and Sollux? Are you and Sollux. Inseparable until you moved out, even if all you ever fucking did was bitch about each other, and shove the other out of bed until your father solved things by getting you bunk beds. Then you’d fight over the top bunk, and you usually won, since you were older. Except for the time Sollux told you that Latula was on the phone, and then jumped into your bed when you got up to answer.

You always had each other’s backs, though. Right up until you left in 2008. And you would stay having his back, if he’d bother to tell you a fucking thing anymore.

You should have told him why you were leaving, back then. Then he wouldn’t blame himself for it. You suspect, given his tendency toward self-loathing, that he would have found something new to blame himself for.

Porrim takes the shirt and skirt from you, and makes quick work of ironing it. You watch her carefully, for when you have to duplicate this without burning holes in anything.

You remember your father ironing you and Sollux’s clothes in the morning when you were younger, and although Sollux is five years and two weeks your junior, he would be completely patient about the whole thing. 

Meanwhile, you’d practically be breathing down the man’s neck like, “Is it done yet? Is it done yet?” until Sollux stomped on your foot, and told you to shut the fuck up in English so your father wouldn’t understand.

You and Porrim watch early-morning television for a while. Then, you start to get dressed.

“Not showering?” Porrim asks. “Or did you do that last night while I was at work?”

“Last night,” you inform her. You braved your fear/delusion of drowning in the shower, because you had your phone on the bathroom sink, with Latula on speaker, detailing the things she would do to you if she were there, the whole time.

You shaved, too, although that wasn’t really necessary. Nobody in your family grows all that much body hair. Sollux is lovingly cultivating a few wisps of black hair on his chin and above his upper lip, alleging that it’s a goatee.

Yeah, okay. It’s a goatee, and you’re the second coming of Jesus Christ.

While you were in the shower, you even washed the mop of black hair on your head, which took forever to comb out without Porrim and Kurloz around to help you section it off and dry it.

“Explains why your hair was so damp last night. I should probably detangle it,” Porrim says. “Do you want me to do something with it, or would you rather keep it down?”

You’re not sure. Keeping your hair in the same disordered configuration would make you feel like yourself. But letting Porrim braid it might give you courage you wouldn’t have ordinarily. A bit of her to carry with you. 

You sit down on the floor, leaning back against the futon, between her legs, and figure that’s her answer.

Her hands are always gentle. You appreciate that much. Your hair isn’t ruler straight like many of your relatives’, so it’s actually not too hard to braid. Once she’s done, she calls the style a French braid, and says it complements your facial features.

When you take a gander at your reflection in the mirror, however, it looks _wrong_ , so you undo the braid as carefully as you can and shake your bangs back into your eyes. Porrim badly pretends to be surprised.

“I need to do my makeup,” you say halfway to her, and halfway to your own reflection.

“You’re going to put on makeup before you meet up with Sollux?” she asks, legitimately surprised now.

“Yeah, like…” You trail off for a moment. “He’s gotta know everything. He’s gotta see it.” You think of Latula’s words. “I can’t hide from him anymore. It’s gonna be like when my cousin threw me into the deep end of the pool.”

You know you’ve told her the story of how Zixin threw you into the 12 foot end of the pool when you were a kid - you were wearing one of those orange life vests, meaning there was no real danger of you drowning - so you’d stop being afraid of the 3 foot end.

Because you weren’t exactly sane, even then, this plan actually worked. You weren’t as scared anymore. So, yeah. You’re going to drop Sollux into the deep end. No half-measures.

“I should do your makeup before you get dressed, if you want to wear makeup,” she says. “Otherwise it might get on your clothes.”

You walk into the bathroom, and sit on the edge of the bathtub. This is where Porrim usually does your makeup, when you decide to wear it. Enderman, the cat, starved for attention, or maybe just plain old hungry, decides to curl up at your feet, letting out a soft “miaow” to inform you of his presence.

She takes out her million and one brushes, a few white foam wedges, and a few bottles of makeup, some of which are shades lighter than the kind she wears.

“I had to eyeball it a little, in terms of the foundation and concealer,” she confesses. “If it’s too light, or too dark, I can fix it, though.”

You give your usual response. “Whatever, Pomary.”

Porrim doing your makeup here is a universal constant. It’s something grounding, even with your thoughts spinning like a kaleidoscope inside your head. 

You have a request of her, however, one you’re actually able to articulate.

“Can you do my eye makeup, and let me do the rest?” you ask.

You can’t do your eyeliner, you know that much. Your fine tremors make lining your eyes almost impossible.

Porrim gives you the same smile she gave you while she was wasted enough to fully speak her mind a few months ago, when you and she both insisted there was nothing disordered about your identity.

“Sure, Mituna. You know which one’s my lipstick brush, don’t you?”

“The tiny one?” you try, picking up the right one, you think.

“Precisely. There’s a few colors in the cabinet. Just use whichever one you like. I don’t mind. The black one might be a little much, though.”

Only she and Kurloz are into black lipstick and that whole aesthetic, so you think you’re good.

She leaves the bathroom.

You put on a little more concealer to hide the constellation of pimples on your face. As for the lipstick, you settle for that siren red you’ve always had an affinity for, lining slightly outside the edges of your lips, and then filling them in, like you’ve learned from YouTube tutorials.

Once you’re done putting your finishing touches on things, namely applying more dark eyeshadow to your eyelids, and setting your face with the spray Porrim told you to use, you start to dress.

Underwear first.

You mouth several curse words at the ceiling, few of them in English. God’s probably multilingual. You hope he’s listening.

Because only thing you hate more than tucking is that one Lit professor you had for that poetry class you took as an elective - you got a C+, even after the curve. Unfortunately, the pencil skirt looks tight enough that if you don’t, your junk might be conspicuous or something. You wouldn’t really care, and your friends wouldn’t care, but other people would.

Who invented gendered clothing? Someone should go back in time and kill that person.

Then, you put on your stockings, and another pair of underwear to anchor things.

You slip into and button up your blouse. It’s looser than it was the last time you wore it, meaning you probably lost weight, despite guzzling Mountain Dew and Old English 800 by the bottle, and eating nothing but Pomary’s cooking, curly fries from the West building’s cafeteria, Doritos, Taco Bell.

The pencil skirt goes up easily, given the fact that your hips aren’t all that wide, but it’s the zipper, which is supposed to zip from the start of your asscrack to your waist, that gives you pause. It zips from behind, and since you’re not quite adept with this shit, your attempts to get it shut aren’t working right.

“Pomary!” you shout. “I’m having a f-fuckin’ wardrobe malfunction! Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”

You yell this before it occurs to you that you could turn it around, zip it from the front, and then turn it around again. Porrim returns to the bathroom, does not roll her eyes at you, and manages to zip it in one easy motion.

“Sit on the edge of the bathtub, Princess Leia,” she says, eyes flashing with amusement. “I want to make sure the zipper doesn’t pop if you sit down.”

You oblige, and since you’re wearing clothes, the bathtub’s porcelain edge isn’t frigid against your ass. And no fucked up zippers, to boot. You’re in the clear.

“Tuck your shirt into your skirt,” Porrim suggests. “It looks better that way. And your makeup looks excellent.”

“Yeah, okay, fuckin’ whatever,” you say in a tone that indicates that you’re actually planning to listen to her for once.

By the time the both of you return to the main room, Calliope’s home, sitting on the futon, blowing on her coffee, picking at her breakfast, and yawning. You’ve a half mind to high five her, since she spent the night with Roxy and Jade, but the fact that she’s back at 11 AM probably means she didn’t get any. 

Or maybe she did. Who even knows?

Latula stays awake after sex, while you (and Porrim) conk right the fuck out afterwards if the sex is great, excepting when Porrim’s in domme mode, and she needs to perform aftercare.

(You used to tell Porrim she wouldn’t have to take mirtazapine for sleep if she got laid every night. All that strenuous physical activity.

“As for my depression?” she quipped.

“Well, uh, it’s hard to be depressed during sex.”

She conceded the point.

“So Doctor Captor, you’re telling me the cure to my condition is to get some?”

“Yeah, man. I’m prescribing orgasms,” you replied. “It’s an excellent treatment. In order to get acquainted with your mind, you must first get acquainted with your right hand.”

That sounded way more intelligent in your head.

She snorted. “One orgasm, TID.”

You didn’t know the abbreviation, but you nodded vigorously.)

Calliope continues to blow on her coffee, as if she hasn’t seen you. You’re still standing in the bathroom doorway, just out of sight. When you properly walk into the main room, Calliope’s mouth drops open.

She beams to the point that that her dimples crinkle up.

“My dear, you look positively splendid,” she says. She walks over to kiss you on the back of your hand.

Calliope would tell you looked good if you were were wearing nothing but a black plastic bag, but you appreciate the compliment. Still, you sigh, and sit down on the futon.

“Tuna?” Porrim asks, concerned.

“M fine,” you insist to her, feeling like you’re going to vomit all of a sudden. “Just… nervous, is all. I could use some fucking courage, honestly. I’m scared shitless.”

You tell them how you wish you could have them with you. Not as auditory hallucinations, or anything like that, and not literally there in the same place as you. 

You just want a little bit of them, to remind yourself that even if everything goes to shit, your other family isn’t that far away.

Porrim kneels so she can put her forehead against yours. “If anything goes wrong, Mituna, Callie and I will be close by.”

Hold on. This was not part of the plan.

You were supposed to meet up with Sollux in that Starbucks on Houston St alone. Not with them. You pull back, and Porrim’s quick to explain.

“There’s a cafe half a block from where you’re supposed to meet your brother,” she says. “If anything at all goes wrong, just text me or Callie. We’ll be there.”

“Since when can you afford anything on Houston Street?” you want to know.

Houston St, land of the overpriced cafes and the bougie art installations. You think a mere latte costs like seven bucks, since the coffee beans were hand picked for their body and flavor, the baristas have a doctorate in making coffee and once served Barack Obama or something, and because Manhattan likes charging you out the ass.

Calliope waves a wad of $20 bills in front of you.

“I got paid last week,” she says, with a triumphant grin. She takes two packs of cigarettes out of her bag, handing one to you and one to Porrim. “You two can thank me later.”

Porrim hands you her last cigarette, opens the new pack, and lights one. Calliope counts out several more twenties, and hands Porrim her fourth of the rent money. Then, she raises her hand like she’s in school, waiting her turn to state an opinion.

“If I could make a suggestion, Mituna?” she asks.

“Go for it, man.”

Calliope goes into the closet for a moment, extricates a small, tarnished box, and takes a butterfly hairpin out of it.

“This always helps me when I’m afraid,” she says. “May I?”

You nod, and she places it in your hair, pinning some of your bangs back, with small, careful hands. It’s almost as delicate as she is. Your hair’s gonna eat the damn thing, and she’ll never see it again.

For her part, Porrim removes a necklace out of her jewelry box, a choker studded with gold stones. You think they’re topaz, or something. She told you once. 

She told you while you were playing Dead Rising.  Ergo, you were not paying attention.

“Turn around,” she tells you, once she gets it around your neck, so she can secure the clasp.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Underneath your shirt, you’re wearing the bra Latula got you.

You grin.

But something’s still missing, and once you see a little black object on the floor, you realize what was off. You don’t think Kurloz will mind if you borrow it. You pick up the fake leather bracelet with the pointy studs, and affix it to your wrist. Your other two roommates nod approvingly.

You gaze at your reflection in the full-length mirror near the bathroom, taking in your appearance. A tall person of indeterminate gender, dressed like they’re going somewhere important, blinks back at you. 

They smile at you, looking half shocked and half pleased. You wave, and they wave.

And then you laugh, full of that glorious joy.

Still, you were expecting some kind of fearlessness to suffuse through you once you saw yourself. But you’re just Mituna.. That will have to be enough, you tell yourself. That will be enough, you tell yourself.

It’s coming up on 11:40 now. You promised Sollux you’d meet him at 12, and unlike you, he’s actually fucking punctual unless something catastrophic happens like his computer breaking, Pornhub being down, or getting an A-.

You want to say something else to your friends, but you’re not sure what. So you don’t.

“I gotta get outta here,” you say, finally.

Porrim quirks an eyebrow. What’s she mad about now?

“I think you’re forgetting something?”

“My skateboard’s right here,” you say, pointing to it.

Porrim says something like “Oh, for the love of Christ,” and throws a pair of her flats at your head. Lucky for you, she misses. Even luckier for you, you and she share a shoe size.

Yeah. Shoes. You might need those. You slip them on, while Callie excuses herself to go laugh her ass off.

“Good luck, Tuna,” Porrim tells you, with a peck on the cheek. “Callie and I should be at the cafe by 12:45, but if anything happens before then, just call. Alright?”

“Yes, Mom,” you say, mockingly.

She gives you a mild look of exasperation before she shuts the door on you.

Then you’re on your board, tearassing your way through traffic, weaving between cars, narrowly avoiding knocking over pedestrians, and generally making a nuisance of yourself. Whoever said you couldn’t have sick moves in a jank ass pencil skirt lied. You pull it down when it rides up. Someone wolf-whistles at you, and you skate faster.

You cannot, for the life of you, remember which Starbucks on Houston you told Sollux to meet you at, and there’s gotta be at least two trillion of them.

You know there’s a place on Wall Street where there are two Starbucks directly across the street from each other, but that’s further downtown. Kurloz called the mundane serendipity of their juxtaposition the closest thing that capitalists would ever have to art. You were stoned out of your mind at the time, so you were inclined to agree, despite the fact that you were in 9th grade, English was never your thing, and he’d used like… four SAT words, so you didn’t quite understand him.

You check your Facebook, while you’re on your board - Porrim would have ten heart attacks if she saw - look through your messages, and catch sight of the address of the Starbucks you’re supposed to meet your brother. Apparently you passed it… two avenues ago. You double back.

Queasy fear settles in your abdomen, once you get to the door. It intensifies when you see Sollux, sitting alone at a table in a corner, on his HP laptop from the year one million BCE. It’s gotta be older than some of the skulls his girlfriend has dug up over the years. It’s so outdated that Tutankhamen had half his court executed for bringing him such a piece of junk as an offering.

When you get rich, if you ever get rich, you’re buying Sollux a better computer, your father a better cane, and your mother a better psychiatrist. Knowing Sollux, he’s probably coding something. He takes no notice of his surroundings.

In East Flatbush, where your old house is, he’s constantly wary, convinced someone’s going to try to rob him for his shitty laptop and his shittier flip phone with the busted ass screen. Here, though? He’s not worried at all.

You kind of want to remind him that people get robbed even here. Don’t drop your guard, you skinny dipshit.

Sollux isn’t even looking for you, yet. You sort of understand this. If you tell him to meet you somewhere at a certain time, you’re guaranteed to get there at least an hour later. A glance at your phone clock tells you that you’re only ten minutes late.

You take the time to order yourself a mocha frap, relishing the brain freeze when you drink half of it in like twenty seconds. You gotta figure out a way to approach Sollux.

He still doesn’t notice you. He’s got those godforsaken earbuds in, the ones Mom tells him to stop wearing outdoors before he gets hit by a car, probably listening to crappy electronica. He tried to get you into Skrillex once, and after you practically gave him a treatise on why this music was godawful, he didn’t try a second time.

But you have never been known for being subtle. You walk up to his table, and drop your tattered backpack on the chair across from him.

“Is it alright if I sit here?” you ask him.

Without glancing up at you, he moves some of his belongings aside. “Yeah, ‘sfine, whatever, it’s no probl–”

Then, he gazes up at you, the coffee he was about to move over in his hand, looking like he’s seen a ghost. His mouth drops open. 

Calliope stuck the butterfly pin in a way that it moves aside some of your hair. You look at Sollux through your blue, unobscured eye. Sollux recovers from your appearance quickly enough. Too quickly, you think.

“So, Tuna,” he says with a grin, leaning forward, elbows on the table, now. “What kind of ridiculous bet did you lose with Porrim, and what was it for?”

You put down your drink on the wooden table, sit down, and don’t answer, looking at the whorls and swirls in the wood. 

You won’t cry, you tell yourself. Then, you’ll fuck up your makeup. You wonder if this particular dilemma has ever happened to Porrim or Latula. They’re way more composed than you’ll ever be, so you actually aren’t sure.

You flick your eyes up to make eye contact with Sollux. You don’t know why you’re so upset with him. He doesn’t know the truth yet. 

But still, it needles at you that he’d think wearing clothing like this would be a punishment for losing some sort of bet. This isn’t something to mock. This is who you are.

You’re ready to get up and leave, but first, you’re going to tell him off.

“I’m glad you think my identity is such a great joke,” you say. “Cause I’m not laughing.”

Sollux blinks at you, bewildered. 

For what it’s worth, he’s not laughing anymore. He reaches across the table, as if he’d like to take your hand, but won’t. Fucking bro code.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he begins slowly. “But I didn’t mean to make fun of you, goh-go, please believe me.”

That phrase. That term.

Older brother. Older brother. Older brother.

It’s like a dagger pointed at your back. An imperative insisting that you stay that person for him. He has no idea what he’s asking, in that one word, but you’ll tell him. You tell him.

“Not your fucking brother, okay?” you say, trying to keep your voice steady. “I don’t know if I ever was.”

He continues to stare at you in utter confusion, except now there’s a desolation swirling through it.

“Tuna, wait, wait, wait,” Sollux says. “I know you’re mad at me for something, but…” And now he looks like he might cry. “Why are you disowning me? Did I do something that bad? Is that why you left? Please tell me.”

Now it’s your turn to look bewildered. When in the flying fuck did you ever insinuate that you’d disown him?

You think back to the last thing you said.

Oh, Sollux, reigning king of catastrophizing the fuck out of everything anyone says to him.

“I’m not disowning you, dumbass,” you say. “Fucking almighty Jesus with taco sauce, you’re still my brother.”

“But you just said–”

This is going to be one of those knock-down drag-out Captor sibling confrontations. You can feel a preemptive migraine coming on.

“I’m not a man, Sollux.” you say. “Therefore, I am not your older brother. Q-E-fuckin-D.”

It takes him about thirty seconds, and then he gives an “Oh”, of vague comprehension. You kind of have to admire the way Sollux just rolls with whatever shit you tell him, because he nods like you’ve told him something as simple as the weather report.

“Oh. Well.” He takes a sip of coffee. You are shocked at how nonplussed he is. Either he’s still in shock, or he truly doesn’t give a damn. He cocks his head to one side, inquisitive, like he’s seeing you for the first time in his life. “So like, you’re a girl now?”

“Not completely.”

“So then, uh, what exactly…? How does this work…?”

And he’s not asking the question derisively, or patronizingly. He’s genuinely curious. You run him through the basics of the gender binary being bullshit, and nonbinary identities being mad fucking legit, and tell him to look up a bunch of shit that you’re already too tired to go through fully.

You have no idea how Porrim does her Social Justice 101 type crap on the regular, for strangers, because you are exhausted, and you’ve only halfway explained your gender to your own brother. 

Once you’re done trying to make him get it, he understands your pronouns, that you’re sometimes a girl, less often a boy, frequently both, and that you like dressing feminine of center when you have the inclination. Like today.

“I’m sorry for laughing at you, Tuna,” he says.

“You didn’t know.”

Then, voice gets low and conspiratorial.

“Should I tell Mama and Baba?” he asks. “I don’t think they’d be that mad.”

You shake your head.

As Porrim or Callie would probably say, “everything in its own time.”

“I’ll tell them myself,” you reply. “They should hear it from me.”

He looks sad. Not about your parents, but about something else.

“Is that why you moved out?”

You can answer this with ease.

“Sort of. Mostly,” you tell him. “I wanted space to be myself. I had to get out. And Pomary needed a roommate.”

“You could have told me, you know. I wouldn’t have judged you! Why didn’t you say anything?” Sollux asks, stray tears rolling down his face. He wipes them away with the collar of his shirt. “Why wouldn’t you trust me?”

You don’t want to reply with something that might upset him. You don’t want to point out to him that his first instinct upon seeing you dressed in a feminine manner was to assume you lost a bet with Porrim and then to laugh about it.

Sollux (and everyone else) jokes that you have no brain-to-mouth filter, but you think you’re starting to develop one.

You don’t want to put him on the defensive, especially since he seems like he wants to listen.

“I didn’t know who I could trust,” you say. “You remember what happened to Porrim when her parents found out about her. I didn’t wanna lie to you. But I couldn’t put myself in danger.”

Even though you’ve dressed like this several times before, you look around carefully. If someone decides to attack you, you want to know it’s coming. Sollux keeps talking.

“We would have never done anything like that to you. I would’ve killed anyone who tried.” he says, somewhat annoyed. “As always, you trusted your friends over your own family,”

Now you’re pissed off, as well.

“My friends _are_ my family, you actual lord of the fucking jackasses,” you point out. “So you can fuck off with that argument.”

Sollux apologizes again. You think you hear him call you a jackass as well.

“I’m doing this wrong, aren’t I?” he asks.

Here comes your usual honesty.

“You’re sorta being a jackass, but… you’re usually a jackass, so no harm no foul,” you say.

He kicks you under the table. You kick him right back. You think of Sollux’s acceptance, and you smile.

What he has to say next surprises you, but not too much.

“You know, you look happier like this,” he says. “I mean, you were always the happy one, but you’ve got this different kind of happiness. Before, I thought it was ‘cause you moved out, but… this? Listen. I don’t really get this shit, but I’m happy for you. Whatever makes you smile like that? Do it.”

You two talk for awhile more, mostly about the ramifications of your identity, and then when you’re both sick of talking about that, you decide to listen to Sollux bitch about his final exams. You rank listening to Sollux worry about not getting straight 100s somewhere around being in the psych ward, unmedicated, in four point restraints. You say exactly this to him, and he mutters that he’s only a jackass because he learned the craft from you.

You decide now’s a good time as any to text Calliope, and tell her that you’re alive, and that Sollux is alive, and nobody’s gotten disinherited so far.

“Why would I disinherit you over your gender?” Sollux asks, once you show him the contents of the message. “If I’m gonna disown you, it’s going to be over something good. Like the fact that you still owe me seventy bucks from 2008.”

“I’ll pay you back when you stop asking. Each time you ask, I’m adding another day.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself, jeh-je,” he says, flipping you the bird with one hand, and then taking a sip of coffee with the other.

You parse the entirety of his sentence, and almost fall out of your chair in shock.

Did he really just say that? Not the part where he told you to go fuck yourself, because that’s basically a greeting between you two. A being from another planet who only observed the interactions between you and Sollux would assume that his name is “fuck you” and your name is “go fuck yourself”.

But the last part. That’s what leaves you gobsmacked.

Jeh-je. Older… sister.

Really?

Older sister. That’s how he addressed you?

You think of a little kid in hir mother’s clothes, spinning, spinning, spinning yourself around so the skirt would flare out. You think of traipsing around in Porrim’s uniform that time you exchanged clothes in 7th grade.

You think of all the research you did in high school to figure out who you were, and how relieved you were when you discovered there was a word for it.

You’re not quite his older sister. It doesn’t fully fit. But it’s closer than the alternative.

You look at the ceiling, until the bright lights induce dark afterimages in your field of vision, in order to stop your tears from falling. Sollux pales by a few shades, sure he’s done something wrong, and you’re angry at him again.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sad, I just–”

You push your hair aside so you can see him fully, and all you can really do is grin for a while. You really don’t care if you’re gonna fuck up your makeup by crying in a few seconds, ‘cause you’re going to do it anyway.

“No, Sollux, it’s fine. I like it,” you say, dabbing at your eyes. “I like it a lot.”

You reach across the table and ruffle his hair.

He leans into the gesture like you’re still kids, then sulkily threatens to bite your hand off if you do it again - with those railroad track braces and everything - because he is not letting you mess up his hair like yours. Your hair is messy enough for three people.

You two sit across from each other and laugh.

“Does that mean I can come over now?” he asks. “Now that I know everything?”

He hasn’t seen Porrim completely naked in the summertime, he hasn’t seen Calliope break shit, and he hasn’t seen Kurloz show up at 4 AM with five hundred bucks and a bag of weed, so he doesn’t know _everything_ , but he knows a few more things than he did before today.

“For sure, sai-lo. Fair warning, there’s no air conditioning, and the place is a mess. And my roommates are fuckin’ weird.”

Sollux snorts. “Just like home, then.”

Yeah, your shitpile house on Grafton St, where your family couldn’t afford air conditioning, and there were entirely too many of your relatives living in that small house, otherwise your parents wouldn’t have been able to swing the mortgage payments.

Contemplating it further, you realize… that’s exactly what your apartment is like, now.

Though you’re not the same person you were at your starting point, once again, Mituna, you have traveled in a complete fucking circle. 

And yet? You’re completely okay with this.


End file.
